Multi-column

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Thoughts

Absolutely loved this one, although it did fall off a bit off toward the end, but still a satisfying quick read. And now I can watch Blade Runner!

Highlights

id765900911

The subjective response, however, when a Philip Dick book has been finished and put aside is that, upon reflection, it does not seem so much that one holds the memory of a story; rather, it is the after effects of a poem rich in metaphor that seem to remain. 🔗

id765910796

So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair.” Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. “So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who’s smart has emigrated, don’t you think?” 🔗

id765911439

“Dial 888,” Rick said as the set warmed. “The desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it.” 🔗

id765913068

In silence Rick Deckard plucked open the door of his hovercar. He had nothing further to say to his neighbor; his mind was on his work, on the day ahead. 🔗

id765913286

In a giant, empty, decaying building which had once housed thousands, a single TV set hawked its wares to an uninhabited room. 🔗

id765918543

Once pegged as special, a citizen, even if accepting sterilization, dropped out of history. He ceased, in effect, to be part of mankind. 🔗

id765919406

Mors certa, vita incerta 🔗

id765919574

The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won. 🔗

id765921096

Isidore stood holding the two handles, experiencing himself as encompassing every other living thing, and then, reluctantly, he let go. It had to end, as always, and anyhow his arm ached and bled where the rock had struck it. 🔗

id765921427

I have to keep calm, he realized. Not let him know I’m a chickenhead. If he finds out I’m a chickenhead he won’t talk to me; that’s always the way it is for some reason. I wonder why? 🔗

id765922147

He felt irritable; office gossip annoyed him because it always proved better than the truth. 🔗

id765922694

Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida. 🔗

id765922815

Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated. As in the fusion with Mercer, everyone ascended together or, when the cycle had come to an end, fell together into the trough of the tomb world. Oddly, it resembled a sort of biological insurance, but double-edged. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal such as man would acquire a higher survival factor through this; an owl or a cobra would be destroyed. 🔗

id765923618

cogitated 🔗

id766363077

The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another. 🔗

id766856262

“We produced what the colonists wanted,” Eldon Rosen said. “We followed the time-honored principle underlying every commercial venture. If our firm hadn’t made these progressively more human types, other firms in the field would have. 🔗

id766857710

He would earn the bounty money. Every cent.
Assuming he made it through alive. 🔗

id766858621

But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.” He added, “Except of course for the upward climb of Wilbur Mercer.” 🔗

id766858650

“But an empathy box,” he said, stammering in his excitement, “is the most personal possession you have! It’s an extension of your body; it’s the way you touch other humans, it’s the way you stop being alone. But you know that. Everybody knows that. Mercer even lets people like me—” 🔗

id766859595

This had always amazed him, these “disease” circuits built into false animals; the construct which he now held on his lap had been put together in such a fashion that when a primary component misfired, the whole thing appeared—not broken—but organically ill. 🔗

id766860235

How did Buster Friendly find the time to tape both his aud and vid shows? Isidore wondered. And how did Amanda Werner find time to be a guest every other day, month after month, year after year? How did they keep talking? They never repeated themselves—not so far as he could determine. Their remarks, always witty, always new, weren’t rehearsed. Amanda’s hair glowed, her eyes glinted, her teeth shone; she never ran down, never became tired, never found herself at a loss as to a clever retort to Buster’s bang-bang string of quips, jokes, and sharp observations. The Buster Friendly Show, telecast and broadcast over all Earth via satellite, also poured down on the emigrants of the colony planets. Practice transmissions beamed to Proxima had been attempted, in case human colonization extended that far. Had the Salander 3 reached its destination, the travelers aboard would have found the Buster Friendly Show awaiting them. And they would have been glad. 🔗

id766861018

the American and Soviet police had publicly stated that Mercerism reduced crime by making citizens more concerned about the plight of their neighbors. Mankind needs more empathy 🔗

id766861232

Maybe Buster is jealous, Isidore conjectured. Sure, that would explain it; he and Wilbur Mercer are in competition. But for what?
Our minds, Isidore decided. They’re fighting for control of our psychic selves; the empathy box on one hand, Buster’s guffaws and off-the-cuff jibes on the other. 🔗

id766862079

“Buster is immortal, like Mercer. There’s no difference.” 🔗

id766881199

I’ll pose as an opera fan, Rick decided as he read further. I particularly would like to see her as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. In my personal collection I have tapes by such old-time greats as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Lotte Lehmann and Lisa Della Casa; that’ll give us something to discuss while I set up my Voigt-Kampff equipment. 🔗

id766882533

What kind of world is it, he asked himself, when an android phones up a bounty hunter and offers him assistance? 🔗

id766883431

Christ that came close, he said to himself. I must have overreacted to Rachael Rosen’s warning; I went the other way and it almost finished me. But I got Polokov, he said to himself. His adrenal gland, by degrees, ceased pumping its several secretions into his bloodstream; his heart slowed to normal, his breathing became less frantic. But he still shook. Anyhow I made myself a thousand dollars just now, he informed himself. So it was worth it. And I’m faster to react than Dave Holden. Of course, however, Dave’s experience evidently prepared me; that has to be admitted. Dave had not had such warning. 🔗

id766884615

As he descended toward the ornate, expansive roof of the opera house he loudly sang a potpourri of arias, with pseudo-Italian words made up on the spot by himself; even without the Penfield mood organ at hand his spirits brightened into optimism. And into hungry, gleeful anticipation. 🔗

id766885398

Thinking this, he wondered if Mozart had had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have, too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal move along. This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name “Mozart” will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile. As the andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But I get them or some other bounty hunter gets them. In a way, he realized, I’m part of the form-destroying process of entropy. The Rosen Association creates and I unmake. Or anyhow so it must seem to them. 🔗

id766889994

“I’ll take the test,” Luba Luft said, “if you’ll take it first.”
Again he stared at her, stopped in his tracks. 🔗

id766891562

Taking the receiver from the harness bull, Rick said, “Mr. Bryant?” He listened, waited; nothing. “I’ll dial again.” He hung up, waited, then redialed the familiar number. The phone rang, but no one answered it; the phone rang on and on. 🔗

id766908143

I’ve got to tell him, he said to himself. It’s unethical and cruel not to. Mr. Resch, you’re an android, he thought to himself. You got me out of this place and here’s your reward; you’re everything we jointly abominate. The essence of what we’re committed to destroy. 🔗

id766908615

At an oil painting Phil Resch halted, gazed intently. The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature’s torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by—or despite—its outcry. 🔗

id766910169

“Only in this book of his collected work,” the clerk said, lifting down a handsome glossy volume. “Twenty-five dollars.”
“I’ll take it.” He reached for his wallet.
Phil Resch said, “My departmental budget could never in a million years be stretched—”
“My own money,” Rick said; he handed the woman the bills and Luba the book. 🔗

id766911167

“But someone has to do this,” Phil Resch pointed out.
“They can use androids. Much better if andys do it. I can’t anymore; I’ve had enough. She was a wonderful singer. The planet could have used her. This is insane.” 🔗

id766916313

So much for the distinction between authentic living humans and humanoid constructs. In that elevator at the museum, he said to himself, I rode down with two creatures, one human, the other android…and my feelings were the reverse of those intended. Of those I’m accustomed to feel—am required to feel. 🔗

id766918837

“We came back,” Pris said, “because nobody should have to live there. It wasn’t conceived for habitation, at least not within the last billion years. It’s so old. You feel it in the stones, the terrible old age. Anyhow, at first I got drugs from Roy; I lived for that new synthetic painkiller, that silenizine. And then I met Horst Hartman, who at that time ran a stamp store, rare postage stamps; there’s so much time on your hands that you’ve got to have a hobby, something you can pore over endlessly. And Horst got me interested in pre-colonial fiction.”
“You mean old books?”
“Stories written before space travel but about space travel.”
“How could there have been stories about space travel before—”
“The writers,” Pris said, “made it up.”
“Based on what?”
“On imagination. 🔗

id766919256

Anyhow there’s plenty here, in the libraries; that’s where we get all of ours—stolen from libraries here on Earth and shot by autorocket to Mars. You’re out at night bumbling across the open space, and all of a sudden you see a flare, and there’s a rocket, cracked open, with old pre-colonial fiction magazines spilling out everywhere. A fortune. 🔗

id766923685

And maybe Milt, who was very inventive, could design a weapon for him to use. Something imaginative, which would slay bounty hunters…whatever they were. He had an indistinct, glimpsed darkly impression: of something merciless that carried a printed list and a gun, that moved machine-like through the flat, bureaucratic job of killing. A thing without emotions, or even a face; a thing that if killed got replaced immediately by another resembling it. And so on, until everyone real and alive had been shot. 🔗

id766924068

“The chickenhead,” Pris said, “likes me.”
“Don’t call him that, Pris,” Irmgard said; she gave Isidore a look of compassion. “Think what he could call you.”
Pris said nothing. Her expression became enigmatic. 🔗

id766931483

“But what does it matter to me? I mean, I’m a special; they don’t treat me very well either, like for instance I can’t emigrate.” He found himself yabbering away like a folletto. “You can’t come here; I can’t—” He calmed himself. 🔗

id766951117

“I don’t think we have to worry about Mr. Isidore,” she said earnestly; she walked swiftly toward him, looked up into his face. “They don’t treat him very well either, as he said. And what we did on Mars he isn’t interested in; he knows us and he likes us and an emotional acceptance like that—it’s everything to him. It’s hard for us to grasp that, but it’s true.” 🔗

id766958693

Euphemia 🔗

id766961801

But anyhow I got hit by a rock, here.” She held up her wrist; on it he made out a small dark bruise. “And I remember thinking how much better we are, how much better off, when we’re with Mercer. Despite the pain. Physical pain but spiritually together; I felt everyone else, all over the world, all who had fused at the same time.” She held the elevator door from sliding shut. “Get in, Rick. This’ll be just for a moment. You hardly ever undergo fusion; I want you to transmit the mood you’re in now to everyone else; you owe it to them. It would be immoral to keep it for ourselves.” 🔗

id766971093

Rick said, “I took a test, one question, and verified it; I’ve begun to empathize with androids, and look what that means. You said it this morning yourself. ‘Those poor andys.’ So you know what I’m talking about. That’s why I bought the goat. I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be a depression, like you get. I can understand now how you suffer when you’re depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone, then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don’t care. Apathy, because you’ve lost a sense of worth. It doesn’t matter whether you feel better, because if you have no worth—” 🔗

id766981637

Rick said, “If I get them I’m going to buy a sheep.”
“You have a sheep. You’ve had one as long as I’ve known you.”
“It’s electric,” Rick said. He hung up. A real sheep this time, he said to himself. I have to get one. In compensation. 🔗

id766983852

On the screen the faint, old, robed figure of Mercer toiled upward, and all at once a rock sailed past him. Watching, Rick thought, My god; there’s something worse about my situation than his. Mercer doesn’t have to do anything alien to him. He suffers but at least he isn’t required to violate his own identity. 🔗

id766989787

“Mercer,” Rick said.
“I am your friend,” the old man said. “But you must go on as if I did not exist. Can you understand that?” He spread empty hands.
“No,” Rick said. “I can’t understand that. I need help.”
“How can I save you,” the old man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled. “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.”
“Then what’s this for?” Rick demanded. “What are you for?”
“To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.”
“Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.”
The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
“That’s all you can tell me?” Rick said.
A rock whizzed at him; he ducked and the rock struck him on the ear. 🔗

id766989899

“I didn’t get anything from holding onto those handles,” Rick said. “Mercer talked to me but it didn’t help. He doesn’t know any more than I do. He’s just an old man climbing a hill to his death.”
“Isn’t that the revelation?”
Rick said, “I have that revelation already.” He opened the hall door. “I’ll see you later.” 🔗

id766991295

“Come down here,” he said, “and we’ll rent a hotel room.”
“Why?”
“Something I heard today,” he said hoarsely. “About situations involving human men and android women. Come down here to San Francisco tonight and I’ll give up on the remaining andys. We’ll do something else.”
She eyed him, then abruptly said, “Okay, I’ll fly down. Where should I meet you?” 🔗

id769076691

Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that’s why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here. A better life, without servitude. Like Luba Luft; singing Don Giovanni and Le Nozze instead of toiling across the face of a barren rock-strewn field. On a fundamentally uninhabitable colony world. 🔗

id769843858

He sipped the bourbon; the power of it, the authoritative strong taste and scent, had become almost unfamiliar to him and he had trouble swallowing. Rachael, in contrast, had no difficulty with hers. 🔗

id770162371

You know what I have? Toward this Pris android?”
“Empathy,” he said.
“Something like that. Identification; there goes I. My god; maybe that’s what’ll happen. In the confusion you’ll retire me, not her. And she can go back to Seattle and live my life. I never felt this way before. We are machines, stamped out like bottle caps. It’s an illusion that I—I personally—really exist; I’m just representative of a type.” She shuddered. 🔗

id771172960

How does it feel to have a child? How does it feel to be born, for that matter? We’re not born; we don’t grow up; instead of dying from illness or old age, we wear out like ants. Ants again; that’s what we are. Not you; I mean me. Chitinous reflex-machines who aren’t really alive.” She twisted her head to one side, said loudly, “I’m not alive! You’re not going to bed with a woman. Don’t be disappointed; okay? Have you ever made love to an android before?” 🔗

id771228711

“Remember, though: don’t think about it, just do it. Don’t pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it’s dreary. For us both.” 🔗

id772218412

“That goat,” Rachael said. “You love the goat more than me. More than you love your wife, probably. First the goat, then your wife, then last of all—” She laughed merrily. “What can you do but laugh?” 🔗

id772422880

Beside him in the darkness the coal of her cigarette glowed like the rump of a complacent lightning bug: a steady, unwavering index of Rachael Rosen’s achievement. Her victory over him. 🔗

id772772833

In the absence of the Batys and Pris he found himself fading out, becoming strangely like the inert television set which he had just unplugged. You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean, before they came here I could stand it, being alone in the building. But now it’s changed. You can’t go back, he thought. You can’t go from people to nonpeople. In panic he thought, I’m dependent on them. Thank god they stayed. 🔗

id773437157

Buster Friendly continued. “Ask yourselves what is it that Mercerism does. Well, if we’re to believe its many practitioners, the experience fuses—”
“It’s that empathy that humans have,” Irmgard said.
“—men and women throughout the Sol System into a single entity. But an entity which is manageable by the so-called telepathic voice of ‘Mercer.’ Mark that. An ambitious politically minded would-be Hitler could—”
“No, it’s that empathy,” Irmgard said vigorously. Fists clenched, she roved into the kitchen, up to Isidore. “Isn’t it a way of proving that humans can do something we can’t do? Because without the Mercer experience we just have your word that you feel this empathy business, this shared, group thing. How’s the spider?” She bent over Pris’s shoulder.
With the scissors, Pris snipped off another of the spider’s legs. “Four now,” she said. She nudged the spider. “He won’t go. But he can.” 🔗

id774038711

Everything in here is old, he realized. It long ago began to decay and it won’t stop. The corpse of the spider has taken over. 🔗

id775075769

“What did you do?” the man holding the flashlight asked.
“I put down a spider,” he said, wondering why the man didn’t see; in the beam of yellow light the spider bloated up larger than life. “So it could get away.”
“Why don’t you take it up to your apartment? You ought to keep it in a jar. According to the January Sidney’s most spiders are up ten percent in retail price. You could have gotten a hundred and some odd dollars for it.”
Isidore said, “If I took it back up there she’d cut it apart again. Bit by bit, to see what it did.”
“Androids do that,” the man said. 🔗

id776436281

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Baty,” Rick said, and shot her.
Roy Baty, in the other room, let out a cry of anguish.
“Okay, you loved her,” Rick said. “And I loved Rachael. And the special loved the other Rachael.” He shot Roy Baty; 🔗

id776587264

What a job to have to do, Rick thought. I’m a scourge, like famine or plague. Where I go the ancient curse follows. As Mercer said, I am required to do wrong. Everything I’ve done has been wrong from the start. Anyhow, now it’s time to go home. Maybe, after I’ve been there awhile with Iran, I’ll forget. 🔗

id776816714

Once, he thought, I would have seen the stars. Years ago. But now it’s only the dust; no one has seen a star in years, at least not from Earth. Maybe I’ll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come. 🔗

id777095764

It would have been rewarding to talk to Dave, he decided. Dave would have approved what I did. But also he would have understood the other part, which I don’t think even Mercer comprehends. For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I’ve done, he thought; that’s become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self. 🔗

id777326560

Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else’s degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves. 🔗

id777364038

At that moment the first rock—and it was not rubber or soft foam plastic—struck him in the inguinal region. And the pain, the first knowledge of absolute isolation and suffering, touched him throughout in its undisguised actual form. 🔗

id777605894

Who threw the stone at me? he asked himself. No one. But why does it bother me? I’ve undergone it before, during fusion. While using my empathy box, like everyone else. This isn’t new. But it was. Because, he thought, I did it alone. 🔗

id777848753

When you use an empathy box you feel you’re with Mercer. The difference is I wasn’t with anyone; I was alone.”
“They’re saying now that Mercer is a fake.”
“Mercer isn’t a fake,” he said. “Unless reality is a fake.” This hill, he thought. This dust and these many stones, each one different from all the others. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that I can’t stop being Mercer. Once you start it’s too late to back off.” Will I have to climb the hill again? he wondered. Forever, as Mercer does…trapped by eternity. “Good-bye,” he said, and started to ring off. 🔗

id777855186

So this is what Mercer sees, he thought as he painstakingly tied the cardboard box shut—tied it again and again. Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world. In every cinder of the universe Mercer probably perceives inconspicuous life. Now I know, he thought. And once having seen through Mercer’s eyes, I probably will never stop.
And no android, he thought, will cut the legs from this. As they did from the chickenhead’s spider. 🔗

id777857588

“God, what a marathon assignment,” Rick said. “Once I began on it there wasn’t any way for me to stop; it kept carrying me along, until finally I got to the Batys, and then suddenly I didn’t have anything to do. And that—” He hesitated, evidently amazed at what he had begun to say. “That part was worse,” he said. “After I finished. I couldn’t stop because there would be nothing left after I stopped. You were right this morning when you said I’m nothing but a crude cop with crude cop hands.”
“I don’t feel that anymore,” she said. “I’m just damn glad to have you come back home where you ought to be.” She kissed him and that seemed to please him; his face lit up, almost as much as before—before she had shown him that the toad was electric. 🔗

id777859757

“It’s the curse on us,” Iran said. “That Mercer talks about.”
“The dust?” he asked.
“The killers that found Mercer in his sixteenth year, when they told him he couldn’t reverse time and bring things back to life again. So now all he can do is move along with life, going where it goes, to death. And the killers throw the rocks; it’s they who’re doing it. Still pursuing him. And all of us, actually. Did one of them cut your cheek, where it’s been bleeding?” 🔗